Quick Rant: Republicans, Economics and Feminism

When people talk about issues like the economy and health care as not particularly applicable to feminism I call bullshit. When people justify their votes for a Republican as feminist neutral because they’re voting for the Republican economic policies and the economy isn’t a feminist issue, that is equally bullshit. Not only is the Republican party racist, homophobic and misogynist, it is the party of incompetence. They drove America into the ground over the last eight years, crippling the economy. This has had a disproportionate effect on women (the effect of sub-prime mortgages on women is just one example), as it has a disproportionate effect on the poor. To have even the pretense of a fair society, at least on this planet, we have to have a functioning economy, because as soon as things get shitty, it flows downhill. Without that functioning economy people suffer, so yes, I do think the economy is a feminist issue, and that voting Republican is an anti-feminist act, just from the economic stand point alone.

Now this isn’t to say that, somewhere, somehow, a registered Republican isn’t a feminist, but cognitive dissonance much?

(Up next: A rant about how feminists don’t actually toe the left-wing or Democrat party-line.)

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The economy is a HUGELY HUGE feminist issue! Geeeeez.

Are there really folks out there saying it’s not?
Cognitive dissonance, indeed.

By: SargassoSea on July 11, 2009 at 11:57 pm

Well said.

Nothing raises my ire more than when some person says, “I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” especially if it’s the fiscal conservatism that ends up determining their vote, and fuck all those homos and poor people and women who will get screwed by their vote to keep more of their money.

This is probably the single biggest pain in the arse when I’m talking feminism with anti-feminists. You get the “Oh shutup and worry about something REALLY important like poverty why dontcha?”
Um hello? Who do you think makes up most of the poverty-stricken classes?
Pretty much everything is a feminist issue.

By: Linda Radfem on July 12, 2009 at 12:01 pm

…people justify their votes for a Republican as feminist neutral because they’re voting for the Republican economic policies and the economy isn’t a feminist issue…

Besides Apostate’s very good point — that not giving a shit about women is antifeminist, not “feminist-neutral” — there are lots of ways in which economic issues are, directly, feminist issues. A large part of the issue of economic inequality is the gendered economic inequality implied in the phrase “feminization of poverty,” and then there’s the whole matter of much of the work women do at home, and caring for other people, being compensated poorly or not at all.

There’s a book I should read about all this, called The Invisible Heart.